Archive for December, 2014

My 10 years old girl is in vacation of school for the Christmas and new years weeks and she wanted to visit our local ZOO, the Ecomuseum of Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, which is a short drive from my home. It’s not a big ZOO but always fun to go with the kids and they made some improvements this year to the enclosures of some of their animals.

Even in a ZOO i like to use long lenses to concentrate on the animal and not showing the enclosure, so for all the photos posted here i used my Canon 7D with my 400mm/5.6 L. I always try to get as natural looking photos as i can. But in some occasions i did exactly the opposite and showed the fences, not this time, probably next time i will try to do that and show the animals against their limits.

This morning it was -15°C when i woke up, so i went on the shore of a river to photograph ice again before it melts in the coming days because it will be warmer and with rains on December 24th. As usual i got very close to the river, even fell on my butt in the cold water, by chance my winter pants are waterproof 🙂 I tried different angles and lenses, this is my favorite one and i converted it in B&W.

Taken with my Fuji X-E1 and Sigma 180mm/5.6 APO Macro at f/11, tripod.

Not much time to shoot this week but got a photo on the shore of a Lake close to my work. Birds are staying later and later now, some even stay here that were flying South some years ago, warmer climate probably ?!?!

These are Great Blue Heron tracks in the snow and ice, i didn’t saw the bird unfortunately. I converted the photo in B&W and finally i like it better than the color version. Taken with my Fuji X-E1 and 18-55mm on a tripod.

This week i was looking for leaves “On” or “In” the ice. One morning i was about to quit my search because i couldn’t found what i was looking for. Then i saw an Oak tree leaf that was partly frozen in the ice, i liked the dark and white pattern of the ice surrounding it.

I wanted to do some updates about that lens since i now have more “in the field experience” with it. In short, i’m now using it more often than my Tamron 90mm/2.8 Macro lens, which was supposed to be my main Macro lens ! There is 2 main reasons for that: more working distance and better lookingBokeh !

The more i use that lens the more i like it, sure it’s not the toughest lens in town but it’s certainly better than a full plastic kit lens. The Sharpness and Bokeh quality surprised me considering the age and price of that lens. Apart from W/O at f/5.6, this lens is quite sharp, i consider it as sharp as my Tamron 90mm/2.8 Model 72E.

Chromatic aberrations

One aspect that i was able to test in the field recently is the CA at f/5.6, i was shooting ice lately so i can now say that this lens is very well corrected, see the crop below.

This shot was taken W/O at f/5.6, not the sharpest setting of the lens but the Bokeh is very clean and the highlights doesn’t show CA.

Bokeh

As i said earlier, the Bokeh of this little Sigma is very pleasing, smooth and good looking.

This photo of ice covered moss was taken at f/11, very nice looking Bokeh !

Another photo of ice covered moss, here i selected f/8, the Bokeh is still looking good and sharpness is very good.

More photos

Here the lens was stopped down to f/13, very good details in the leaves.

Here i did use a polarizer to cut off some of the reflections, again, i selected f/13.

I still don’t like the aperture ring but i’m getting used to it …. sort of. The lens is doing well with my Fuji X-E1 (all the photos posted here were taken on my X-E1) because of it’s size and weight. I just bought an adapter to use the lens on my Canon 7D, i didn’t had the time to try them together but i’m sure they will work well even if the 7D don’t have focus peaking like the X-E1. That Sigma 180mm/5.6 Macro is now part of my regular kit and it’s always in my camera bag, it makes a very good combo with my X-E1 and produces great images !